Any researcher who enters an archives to use a
photographic collection comes in with some version of the same goal: to
discover the truth about an event, individual, time, or place as it is
represented visually. Being able to identify this truth, however, is much
more difficult than it may seem. It takes a trained eye and an informed
perspective in order to wade through all of the visual white noise, so to
speak, in order to get to the roots of what is being presented in each
photograph. It can be even more challenging to accomplish this same task
when working with a series of photographs with a shared narrative.
Through a variety of different presentations of the
notion, archivists and photography critics have defined the ability to
"read" photographs as visual literacy, following the logic one uses
when analyzing a textual artifact. One must develop their visual literacy
skills through repeated exposure over time; just as a child learns to read by stringing
words together, the researcher who analyzes the photographic medium has to
understand the difference between identifying a photograph's subject, context,
and possibly even the process of capturing the image.
Jacob A. Riis, Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters
Kaplan and Mifflin break down this idea into three
levels of visual awareness. (79) At the first level the viewer must
determine what a photograph is "of." This is a superficial concept based
simply on determining the immediately recognizable subjects depicted, whether
it is a city street, a soldier, or sleeping children. The second level is
more concrete, in that a viewer determines what the image is really
"about" based on a more complex analysis of specific historical
knowledge. The city street may represent the architectural landscape of a
given era, the soldier may be a deserter of war, and the sleeping children may be victims of extreme poverty or abandonment. The third level of visual
awareness is perhaps the most difficult to grasp because it involves the purely
visual or abstract elements of a photograph; the slightest details that only
experienced photographers would even notice, and thus be able to interpret.
Recognition of such subtleties as the organization of space, the image's
frame, the camera angle, lighting, and exposure can be extremely telling,
however, about the photographer's original intention when taking a given
photograph.
If a viewer is equipped with such knowledge, recognizing that photographing from a low angle, for example, makes the subject appear large and powerful, then they have an advantage over the researcher who can only identify what a photograph is of and about. However, one must never forget that "photographic meaning is always conditional, without ultimate or absolute authority, and always plural" (Schlak 93). Although an interpretation of a photograph may seem flawless based on the culmination of the three levels of visual awareness, there is always the danger of committing the intentional fallacy (to borrow a term from literature theory) of assigning photographic intentions that may not have been present at all. The low angle of the photographer's image may have merely been circumstantial, so it is important to remember not to attach meanings to any photographs without substantial supporting evidence. This logic may seem circular and confusing, since the photograph can be seen as evidence itself, but that is what makes visual literacy such a complex issue.
To further complicate things, there is not one simple category under which all photographs automatically fall before they can be interpreted. Photographs are taken for a variety of reasons, and there are "constant shifts of perspective over the meaning of photography as art, as historical evidence, or as a medium for representing reality" (Conway and Punzalan 68). Not only do the meanings behind these various categories shift, but the photographs within them can be re-categorized over time as they are seen to fulfill a different purpose. For example, Eugene Atget's famous pictures of Parisian streets had once been conceptualized by the photographer as plain documents or reference material, but now they are considered to be high art with implied narratives. (Brückle 984) Along the same lines, Wolfgang Brückle quotes Walker Evans in his article, writing, "art can never be a document, but has the ability to adopt its style" (981). Yet on the very same page, he continues, "'documentary' is usually understood as a visual genre with specific characteristics, including the implication that the photographer is operating in a non-artistic way." (981) So as you can see from these convoluted descriptive attributes, even archivists must be careful when using their visual literacy skills to categorize their photographs, because one form may imitate the other, and some may even be understood as both art and document. Personally, I don't think any photographer "operates in a non-artistic way." He or she may not be photographing for art's sake, but what makes one documentary photograph superior to another may come down to which image is more beautiful, because every photographer captures their subjects with composition in mind.
There is no doubt that archivists have their work cut out for them when it comes to writing description for photographs, because not only are many of them trained to deal with mostly textual material, but many of their users will be similarly "visually illiterate" (Lesy 147). In order to create helpful descriptions for their patrons, archivists have to figure out how to translate a visual medium into text.
Other articles focus on instructing archivists how not to view photographs. Archivists should read photographs against textual models in order to view them not as trustworthy documentation of history, but instead as documents whose meaning "lies in the context of document creation" (Schlak 93). The goal is to make photographs equally as readable as textual archival materials, but not necessarily using the same methods for analysis, because very different formats deserve very different approaches. However, because the archival literature available really does not provide much direction for understanding visual materials in archival terms, Conway and Punzalan suggest that one should read outside the field. This way, archivists can extrapolate the methodological approaches from one medium to another, in order to gain a clearer understanding of the nature and value of visual materials as archival, and in turn, improve archival approaches to appraisal, acquisition, description and access. (68) Extensive description of visual materials is also vital for preservation and for ease of reference for researchers. (Kaplan and Mifflin 91)
What is really going to be interesting is seeing how all of this continues to develop and change with the availability of more and more digital versions of archival photographs online. Rockenbach and Fabian in their article Visual Literacy in the Age of Participation believe that we already live in a culture dominated by images, and so with archival photographs being scanned to the web, users have an expectation for a more participatory process when it comes to handling them. This situation "forces information professionals to rethink their role in the flow of information and suggests responsibility for nurturing a new range of skills and literacies such as higher-level critical thinking skills, problem-based inquiry, and visual literacy" (27).
However, the question arises about whether or not the same visual literacy skills apply to digital surrogates and their original artifactual objects. Obviously, when analyzing a photograph that you have directly in front of you, you can assess qualities that may not be noticeable in a digital reproduction; the material, how it has held up or been damaged over time, sheen or matte texture, and there may even be details in the image you might miss if there is not adequate enlarging technology. But more importantly, digitizing images comes with the possible consequence of separating them from their original context, and putting them at risk of floating around lost in cyberspace. "As we transform visual artifacts into disembodied digital images, we risk losing key information that allows us to understand how the image once circulated through a world of popular culture, how viewers once encountered it, how the physical object changed over time" (Sandweiss 198). On the other hand, reproducibility is part of (most) photograph's nature, and so that technology alone does not necessarily mean there has to be a shift in meaning as long as the integrity of the image has been maintained, and thus, how you would read the photograph using visual literacy. One should be aware, however, that the slightest bit of cropping, for example, could make a huge difference in how the image is perceived According to some, if handled properly, digitization can actually serve to enliven the archival experience with photographs: "Digital surrogacy enables users to find new interpretations, or to create and articulate new levels of visual meaning...Investigating digital visual literacy from the user perspective offers a profound insight into the nature of the digitized record itself" (Conway and Punzalan 96).
To finish, I would like to return to the idea of the "truth" behind an image. The very first photographs, daguerreotypes, showed the absolute truth of reality because of their vivid detail. For some, this truth was too literal, and so some photographers like Edward Steichen began softening their focus and working on prints by hand in order to create the truth that was alternatively desired, which was a step away from reality. (Thompson 22) Today, we appreciate this original level of realistic detail for purposes of historical understanding. One article even made a comparison between the paintings of Jan van Eyck, who incorporated a depiction of living spaces and personal symbolic details in his portraits, and early portrait daguerreotypes, which are less subjective if presented in their original form because of their real details. (Kaplan and Mifflin 83)
In his collection of essays entitled Truth and Photography, Jerry Thompson in a way combined the three concepts that make up visual literacy: what the image is of, what the image is about, and how the image is presented. He writes that the truth of images is that they are not simply 'of'' something, "but rather [are] things in their own right, with importances of their own. What the picture [is] 'of' is of course important, but equally important [is] how the space of the whole picture was filled up in a beautiful way, with lines and color and rhythmic pattern extending right out to the edges and corners" (27). Visual literacy is definitely a skill that needs to be developed with practice over time, and it is essential that both the archivist describing the photographs and the researcher who accesses them educate themselves about the contextual history of the time the photograph was taken, in order to understand both the historical landscape and the photographic processes involved in each image. Only through visual literacy can we come even close to using the textual form to describe the inherently visual medium of photography.
Works Cited
Photographer unknown, Aleksey Gordeyevich Yeremenko fighting in WWII
If a viewer is equipped with such knowledge, recognizing that photographing from a low angle, for example, makes the subject appear large and powerful, then they have an advantage over the researcher who can only identify what a photograph is of and about. However, one must never forget that "photographic meaning is always conditional, without ultimate or absolute authority, and always plural" (Schlak 93). Although an interpretation of a photograph may seem flawless based on the culmination of the three levels of visual awareness, there is always the danger of committing the intentional fallacy (to borrow a term from literature theory) of assigning photographic intentions that may not have been present at all. The low angle of the photographer's image may have merely been circumstantial, so it is important to remember not to attach meanings to any photographs without substantial supporting evidence. This logic may seem circular and confusing, since the photograph can be seen as evidence itself, but that is what makes visual literacy such a complex issue.
Eugène Atget, 'Shopfront, Quai Bourbon, Paris, France'
To further complicate things, there is not one simple category under which all photographs automatically fall before they can be interpreted. Photographs are taken for a variety of reasons, and there are "constant shifts of perspective over the meaning of photography as art, as historical evidence, or as a medium for representing reality" (Conway and Punzalan 68). Not only do the meanings behind these various categories shift, but the photographs within them can be re-categorized over time as they are seen to fulfill a different purpose. For example, Eugene Atget's famous pictures of Parisian streets had once been conceptualized by the photographer as plain documents or reference material, but now they are considered to be high art with implied narratives. (Brückle 984) Along the same lines, Wolfgang Brückle quotes Walker Evans in his article, writing, "art can never be a document, but has the ability to adopt its style" (981). Yet on the very same page, he continues, "'documentary' is usually understood as a visual genre with specific characteristics, including the implication that the photographer is operating in a non-artistic way." (981) So as you can see from these convoluted descriptive attributes, even archivists must be careful when using their visual literacy skills to categorize their photographs, because one form may imitate the other, and some may even be understood as both art and document. Personally, I don't think any photographer "operates in a non-artistic way." He or she may not be photographing for art's sake, but what makes one documentary photograph superior to another may come down to which image is more beautiful, because every photographer captures their subjects with composition in mind.
There is no doubt that archivists have their work cut out for them when it comes to writing description for photographs, because not only are many of them trained to deal with mostly textual material, but many of their users will be similarly "visually illiterate" (Lesy 147). In order to create helpful descriptions for their patrons, archivists have to figure out how to translate a visual medium into text.
Not only does the archivist working with or writing about the photograph require specialized, graduate-level fluency in a particular academic discourse, the archivist must successfully account for the nature of a photograph, in Elizabeth Edwards’ words, as: ‘one of ambiguity and disjunction,’ as a ‘medium of fragmentation, of fractured space and stilled time, of shifting meaning and of ambiguity in relating the part to the whole.’ Working with photographs then is a process of substantiating the most valid narrative that a photograph collection can evoke and transcribing it into the academic discourses of our time. (Schlak 96)There are a few suggestions in the archival literature about how visual literacy can be developed in order to properly read photographs, for the researcher and the archivist. In his article, Michael Lesy suggests that in order to analyze photography, you have to learn to think like a photographer. He writes about how both good visual researchers and accomplished photographers have the ability to inform their "looking" (through the lens, or at the resulting photograph) with contextual knowledge, aesthetic judgment, visual acuity, and visual memory. He truly believes that "the visual language of photography, like any other language, is best learned by 'speaking it'" (147). In other words, his advice for becoming visually literate is through the practice of photography. While I can certainly see his point, this is much more easily said than done, and would not be the most convenient solution for every archivist and photo researcher.
Other articles focus on instructing archivists how not to view photographs. Archivists should read photographs against textual models in order to view them not as trustworthy documentation of history, but instead as documents whose meaning "lies in the context of document creation" (Schlak 93). The goal is to make photographs equally as readable as textual archival materials, but not necessarily using the same methods for analysis, because very different formats deserve very different approaches. However, because the archival literature available really does not provide much direction for understanding visual materials in archival terms, Conway and Punzalan suggest that one should read outside the field. This way, archivists can extrapolate the methodological approaches from one medium to another, in order to gain a clearer understanding of the nature and value of visual materials as archival, and in turn, improve archival approaches to appraisal, acquisition, description and access. (68) Extensive description of visual materials is also vital for preservation and for ease of reference for researchers. (Kaplan and Mifflin 91)
What is really going to be interesting is seeing how all of this continues to develop and change with the availability of more and more digital versions of archival photographs online. Rockenbach and Fabian in their article Visual Literacy in the Age of Participation believe that we already live in a culture dominated by images, and so with archival photographs being scanned to the web, users have an expectation for a more participatory process when it comes to handling them. This situation "forces information professionals to rethink their role in the flow of information and suggests responsibility for nurturing a new range of skills and literacies such as higher-level critical thinking skills, problem-based inquiry, and visual literacy" (27).
However, the question arises about whether or not the same visual literacy skills apply to digital surrogates and their original artifactual objects. Obviously, when analyzing a photograph that you have directly in front of you, you can assess qualities that may not be noticeable in a digital reproduction; the material, how it has held up or been damaged over time, sheen or matte texture, and there may even be details in the image you might miss if there is not adequate enlarging technology. But more importantly, digitizing images comes with the possible consequence of separating them from their original context, and putting them at risk of floating around lost in cyberspace. "As we transform visual artifacts into disembodied digital images, we risk losing key information that allows us to understand how the image once circulated through a world of popular culture, how viewers once encountered it, how the physical object changed over time" (Sandweiss 198). On the other hand, reproducibility is part of (most) photograph's nature, and so that technology alone does not necessarily mean there has to be a shift in meaning as long as the integrity of the image has been maintained, and thus, how you would read the photograph using visual literacy. One should be aware, however, that the slightest bit of cropping, for example, could make a huge difference in how the image is perceived According to some, if handled properly, digitization can actually serve to enliven the archival experience with photographs: "Digital surrogacy enables users to find new interpretations, or to create and articulate new levels of visual meaning...Investigating digital visual literacy from the user perspective offers a profound insight into the nature of the digitized record itself" (Conway and Punzalan 96).
To finish, I would like to return to the idea of the "truth" behind an image. The very first photographs, daguerreotypes, showed the absolute truth of reality because of their vivid detail. For some, this truth was too literal, and so some photographers like Edward Steichen began softening their focus and working on prints by hand in order to create the truth that was alternatively desired, which was a step away from reality. (Thompson 22) Today, we appreciate this original level of realistic detail for purposes of historical understanding. One article even made a comparison between the paintings of Jan van Eyck, who incorporated a depiction of living spaces and personal symbolic details in his portraits, and early portrait daguerreotypes, which are less subjective if presented in their original form because of their real details. (Kaplan and Mifflin 83)
 |
| Jan van Eyck "The Arnolfini Marriage" |
 |
| Photographer unknown, daguerreotype of couple in their living quarters |
In his collection of essays entitled Truth and Photography, Jerry Thompson in a way combined the three concepts that make up visual literacy: what the image is of, what the image is about, and how the image is presented. He writes that the truth of images is that they are not simply 'of'' something, "but rather [are] things in their own right, with importances of their own. What the picture [is] 'of' is of course important, but equally important [is] how the space of the whole picture was filled up in a beautiful way, with lines and color and rhythmic pattern extending right out to the edges and corners" (27). Visual literacy is definitely a skill that needs to be developed with practice over time, and it is essential that both the archivist describing the photographs and the researcher who accesses them educate themselves about the contextual history of the time the photograph was taken, in order to understand both the historical landscape and the photographic processes involved in each image. Only through visual literacy can we come even close to using the textual form to describe the inherently visual medium of photography.
Works Cited
Brückle,
Wolfgang. "Almost Merovingian: On Jeff Wall’s Relation To Nearly
Everything." Art History 32 (5): 977-995. Online.
Conway,
Paul, and Ricardo Punzalan. "Fields of Vision: Toward a New Theory of
Visual Literacy for Digitized Archival Photographs." Archivaria 71:
63-97. Online.
Kaplan,
Elisabeth, and Jeffrey Mifflin. ""Mind and Sight": Visual
Literacy and the Archivist." Archival Issues 21 (2): 74-97. Online.
Lesy,
Michael. "Visual Literacy." The Journal of American History 94
(1): 143-153. Online.
Rockenbach,
Barbara, and Carole Ann Fabian. "Visual Literacy in the Age of
Participation." Art Documentation 27 (2): 26-31. Online.
Sandweiss,
Martha A. . "Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital
Age." The Journal of American History. 193-202. Online.
Schlak,
Tim. "Framing photographs, denying archives: the difficulty of focusing on
archival photographs." Archival Science 8: 85-101. Online.
Thompson, Jerry L.. Truth and photography: Notes on Looking and
Photographing. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Print.
